Give Me Back My Dress

When Venus Hum released “Give Me Back My Dress,” in 2008, it felt
like a paean to turning thirty. The thirties are a point in life where
big milestones start being checked off: houses, babies, cars, and leaps
of faith. For some of us, these touchstones come a little faster, for
some a little slower, and for some they mean nothing at all. Society has
a lot to say about where we’re at in life, but we’re really our own
worst enemy when it comes to defining personal success. Because the end
goal is so important, it’s easy to do more developing in the process
than we meant to and this change impacts relationships with our
families, friends, and lovers.

There are as many reasons for people to split up as there are
couples, but it wasn’t until I turned thirty that I started to see the
dissolution of relationships become widespread. In our teens and
twenties, I expected it — given how much transformation was happening at
that time, and yet most of my social circle made it through. But in our
next decade, people started looking at life through the lens of “now or
never” and relationships that couldn’t support these leaps fell by the
wayside. Despite all this forward motion, however, newfound solitude
seemed to cause a large portion of my friends to look backwards, if only
for a moment.

***

“Three in the morning means nothing to you.
It’s all the same as two in the afternoon.
I have a question. You have an answer
Always no. Always no, no, no.”

***

I read somewhere recently that memories are temporary. After awhile,
your brain takes a picture of the first memory but stops short of
recalling the actual moment — more like a snapshot of a snapshot.
Traumatic experiences excepted, it seems to be easier for me to remember
sweeping generalities about times and places and experiences. Rarely
can I access the emotions attached. This must be the reason why, when
things start looking frightening, we go backwards to where things feel
familiar, and, falsely, safe.

“Give Me Back My Dress” could really be about a thousand different
things, but to me, it’s about relationships — the broken bits of them
and how we go back to those crumbs when we’ve got too much on our plates
or not enough. This kind of reflection can be healing or annihilating.
How do we protect ourselves when we return to the scene of past crimes
whenever anything goes wrong?

***

“If you don’t remember, how can I? Is it a mirage, a bright light?
Pulled from a black hole you hid deep inside. I climbed right in when you said “Hi.”
I seem to remember how is it that you don’t
Did you make it shine and cover it with hope?”

***

I started most of my relationships believing that they had some
relationship to a fairy tale — with the right ingredients, there’d be a
happy ever after. I had no idea what real love looked like until I had
to work at it. I didn’t understand that love was fluid concept that
would need constant tending for the rest of the relationship. It seems
to be a closely held secret among adults that no one has it figured out.
Every relationship is trial and error and compromise. And, at the risk
of sounding like Dear Abby, we aren’t careful enough when we decide to
move on.

We’re still stuck believing we deserve the broken.

I wish I could say I only had one or two friends who pull up their
little black books for solace instead of getting back into the saddle
again. My mom once told me that dating your ex is like eating out of
your own garbage can. And I think there’s some truth to it because of
that memory thing (serious traumas excepted, of course). I can remember
that I had the chicken pox and that I itched, but I can’t go back and
experience the burn and the misery anymore. It feels safe to peek back
around that corner. He might want you now. Maybe she changed her mind.
And it’s possible — sometimes it even works — that the right person was
with you at the wrong time. The trouble is when he or she thinks they
don’t deserve any better, like that past failure was probably as good as
it was going to get.

We accept change in ourselves but not others.

I can’t count the number of relationships (of all kinds) I torpedoed
in my 20s because I couldn’t accept the changes in my friends and lovers
were going through. I grew up using egocentrism as a survival
mechanism, and it was far easier to be unforgiving than understanding.
There’s a line we learn about as we mature, I think, between compromise
and termination within a relationship. On one end, you can learn and
grow together but the other side is necessary when your life has to come
to a halt in order to maintain that relationship. A lot of things we
agonize over are small — it’s all about perception. I constantly want to
go back and apologize and right things — but it’s selfish to think that
everything in a room (or a city or a friend or lover’s life) stops
because you aren’t there anymore.

We’re busy trying to be what the other person wants.

Many years ago, I got a fortune cookie that said, “You are the center
of his universe.” At the time, I thought it was very romantic. Several
years and a few relationships later, I think it’s the most narcissistic
and delusional fortune I’ve ever received. I grew up around girls who’d
been taught to fold themselves into the image they thought other people,
particularly men, wanted. Some have never bothered to ask themselves
who they’d like to be. And this is a disservice to everyone involved. If
a facade becomes uncomfortable, then both sides deal with guilt and
recriminations that the other never signed on for.

We don’t know how to look inward without pity.

It was maybe our second or third date (ten years ago) when my partner
quipped “The common denominator in your failed relationships is you.” I
don’t know the source of the quote, but it’s truth. It’s important to
understand how we contributed to every ending in our lives, even if that
examination ends painfully for ourselves. For example, a friend of a
friend used to have a test. He’d open the locked passenger car door for a
girl and if she didn’t reach over and unlock his door, he’d dismiss her
out of hand. But these sorts of tests set us up for failure. If we set
traps for our partners and friends and they unknowingly fail us, we can
be sure of the outcome and dismiss our contribution to the end of that
relationship. We can excuse ourselves of responsibility and avoid any
possibility of pain.

***

“I have a lovely, lovely, lovely life.
You ruined a bit, but now that’s all behind.”

***

I think that being vulnerable — turning to the unknown instead of the
known — is an exercise, not an instinct in life or love or any
combination of the two. It’s a way to begin with a truly clean slate,
fresh air in the wings, blue sky in the lungs, learning to give
ourselves the benefit of the doubt. When we take back what’s ours — our
pasts, our desires, our dresses — we can get on to the business of
shoring up our self-respect and loving ourselves and, just maybe,
somebody else.

***

Camille Griep is a writer based in Seattle,
Washington. She likes power outages, chrysanthemums, Chinese food,
bears, dancing, and Pinot Gris. She dislikes wind, grocery shopping,
loud noises, food fights, laminate flooring, sneezing, and smelly
laundry detergent. When not hard at work on her first novel, she writes
shorter fiction like “The Spider,” forthcoming in the July 2012 issue of
On The Premises. She can also be found on twitter: @camillethegriep.